For an actor, the little things inform a performance and can help figure out a character as so much is never seen or heard but is all in the performer’s mind as they get in character. After having some difficulties when signing on for the role of The Grabber, a serial killer hunting children, Ethan Hawke figured out it was all about the masks in The Black Phone to help him understand how to play the villain, as he explains in an interview with Collider.
“So I didn’t really know and I asked a lot of questions about the mask, and I was confused by the answers, and it wasn’t until I saw them that I knew how to play the part,” Ethan Hawke said about The Black Phone masks. “I found it absolutely fascinating that there were like eight different versions of the mask and we could pick different ones for different scenes. Scott had a logic to it all that was the logic of a mad person. There wasn’t necessarily an exact rhyme or reason, it was just his own broken mechanism trying to communicate in his own broken way. And the mask made him real for me in some strange way. It was like he’s ashamed of himself and that shame is driving him to even more unimaginable crimes.”
Ethan Hawke Puts on Masks in The Black Phone
In the interview, Ethan Hawke talks about the mental process of The Black Phone to become The Grabber. Since the film lacks exposition, a lot of it had to be created internally with his imagination.
“The guy is clearly broken, malevolent and terrible, and when you’re doing things like hurting children, I don’t really care about the reason. I, the actor, need to know a reason. What makes him laugh? Why does he do X and not Y? What is it that makes him violent vs. kind, and what does he think is kind? I have to think about what that phone means to me and how this whole thing started, but what I like about the movie is that it doesn’t tell you what they are.”
Donning masks in The Black Phone is not the first project Ethan Hawke has done with director Scott Derrickson and co-writer C. Robert Cargill. The three worked together on Sinister. Cargill and Derrickson are often collaborators as they worked together on the first Doctor Strange.
The Black Phone is based on a short story by Joe Hill, Stephen King’s son who followed in his father’s footsteps by writing horror. The adaption releases in theaters on June 24th.